Oregon musical performances may be suspended, but Oregon music plays on. Oregon classical musicians aren’t letting a little thing like a deadly pandemic and total cancellation of live performances stop them from bringing the sounds. Tonight, Friday May 8, at 10 pm,
Strikes, unions, mega-corporations and the unpaid labors of love (with a tip of the hat to Bandcamp).
Examining the New Flesh. Staying home and slaying dragons. Running on a treadmill. It’s corona time.
Music in the Time of Pandemic: Turn off the web, put on an album, close your eyes, and listen.
No fooling, no fake news: an imaginative leap into a possible musical future.
First of all, how are you? Eating enough? Staying inside and entertained? Called your friends and/or family lately? Good. Let’s start by collectively admitting that we’re Not Doing Alright. It’s been a busy two weeks since last we spoke, dear reader: schools
Bad news, everyone! No, it’s not quite the end of the world. But, yes, shows are being canceled.
Defining “American”: Caroline Shaw, nyckelharpa and hardanger fiddle, Carnatic voice & violin, harps & drums, American gothick.
Notes for an extra day: A weekend of concerts and a Portland Weird undectet.
An Oregon lineup that mines the meanings of “Americana” and “world music.”
Matthew Neil Andrews thinks about the phantom zone of “world music” and what it really means.
Matthew Neil Andrews spots composers everywhere, and a jazz festival, too.
Normally we like to contain all our monthly previews in one tidy column. But since February starts this weekend, we’d like to tell you all about the first stretch of Februarial concerts now–and we’ll tell you about the rest of the month
Tonight, tonight, tonight! Your busy music editor has to miss a bunch of cool stuff tonight, dear reader: I’ll be schlepping gongs and playing reyong with Gamelan Wahyu Dari Langit, opening for Wet Fruit at Mississippi Studios. If you followed our adventures
In which we bid adieu to Neil Peart and comfort ourselves with winey classical marimba, saturnalian psalms, and an operatic sistah.
Oregon has two winters as well as two summers. We’ve just wrapped up First Winter: the time when it hasn’t gotten too terribly cold and miserable, holiday cheer is in the air, and everybody’s all excited for the solstice and the new
New Year’s Eve, like Death, is the great equalizer. We all celebrate the solstice-adjacent holidays differently–Christmas, Kwanzaa, Yule, Festivus, Hogswatch, and so on–but those of us who follow the Gregorian calendar all come to the end of 2019 at more or less
Treat your ears with modern classical, vintage pop, nouveau prog, Australian psych, and Portland Gothic.
Ho ho ho! Oregon First Winter is fully upon us: the snow and ice and seasonal depression haven’t hit in full force yet, but it’s finally cold and rainy enough to talk about holiday music. Let’s get started with an old favorite:
Bah, humbug! It’s too early for Christmas music, don’t you think? Just because December is upon us, with its flakey promises of snow, doesn’t mean there isn’t a nice pile of early unholiday presents waiting. We’ve got a good dozen or two
As Lou Harrison said, music is basically a song and a dance. Welcome to a week of it.
There are a handful of things that make a city’s musical culture feel complete. You need several symphony orchestras and large choirs, and they all have to be pretty damn good. You also need several smaller choral and instrumental ensembles overlapping with
What’s up? Big bands, big choirs, chamber classical, and hybrid music from Indonesia and the British Isles.
Our most excellent wrap of November music classical, new, jazzy, and hybrids in between.
The world is already a haunted house. Killer clowns, mercenary robots, dystopian surveillance states, wildfires galore–what do you need a haunted house for? Instead, go lurk in the shadows with some dark music and costumed fun. There are dozens of tribute shows
The present author normally adheres to a strict “no promoting your own shows” policy, but since I spent a month telling you all about band camp in Bali, I feel it’s only fair to let you know that the results of that
Third Angle welcomes Oregonian composers home. Creative Music Guild improvises.
We stumble upon a Hall of Fame inductee, learn about joiking and konnakol, and hear from the audients.
Warm up your fall with saxophones, film and classical music, international virtuosi, and metallized Metroids.
Matthew Neil Andrews tells all: Your guide to choosing a balanced musical diet.
“Classical”? “Popular”? The week’s music ducks and dodges around a blurry line.
Monster surf, homebrewed string quartets, double drumming, and the tyranny of evil men.
It’s a busy month of music in Oregon, from classical to hip-hop to experimental and more.
What’s up: Retro rock, math punk, psychedelic cumbia, shredded metals, and Jimmie Herrod.
Folksy chamber operas, locavore choral music, doom and psych and loops, pairs of pairs of pairs.
Happy Indonesian Independence Day! Seventy-four years ago today, Indonesia declared its independence from the Netherlands after three centuries of Dutch colonialism (I’ll bet you thought they were always just about tulips and weed). To celebrate, here’s a little video (if you can’t
Music editor in Bali, women in wine country, classical jamming in NoPo.
Out-of-town festivals, funk at the zoo, opera ‘bout Guthrie, we’re all Kulululu.
Allow me to get personal for a moment. You, my dear readers, know that I’m involved in this vibrant local music scene I’ve been writing about every week for the last three years. As a student at Portland State University, I walk
Portland summers have a little something for everyone. If you like your summers dry, hot, and aggressive, you can easily get your fill of blinding, baking, oppressively sweaty sunpocalypse. If you like your summers bitter, cloudy, soggy, and unseasonably cold—well, you’ll get
Chamber Music Northwest seems a lot quieter since the clarinet circus left town. After last week’s brouhaha—a wide swath of concerts featuring upwards of a hundred clarinets—the audiences at Thursday night’s Copland/Shaw concert and today’s New@Noon felt hushed, rapt, attentively relaxed in
La Finta GiardinieraJuly 12-27, Newmark TheaterIn The Penal ColonyJuly 26-August 10, Hampton Opera Center It’s oddly appropriate that Portland Opera is closing its season with summer performances of Mozart and Philip Glass. Both composers are that rare breed: equally adept at performing
“Good afternoon! I’m David Shifrin, and I play the clarinet!” A big roomful of laughing clarinetists goes “woooo!” and welcomes the Chamber Music Northwest Artistic Director to Portland State University’s Lincoln Performance Hall for the first of the festival’s five New@Noon concerts.
Caution: Radioactive glowing disk has returned to Oregon’s skies! Remember your sunscreen! Remember your sunscreen! Message repeats. Five weeks and one day There’s an old zen saying: you should meditate 20 minutes every day unless you’re too busy, in which case you
There’s an old Oregon saying: “April showers bring May showers.” Our famously persnickety springs tend to veer from warm noon-times of glorious blooming sunshine to those long desperate afternoons of deep drizzling gloom that have our S.A.D. souls begging the gods, “when
Music, like any other art form, must prove itself to each generation if it’s going to last. That’s why classical music and jazz organizations increasingly sponsor shows suited to kids and families, like Oregon Symphony’s Sci-Fi at the Pops shows Saturday and
Classical music still lags a ways behind, say, the reggae community when it comes to appropriately celebrating 4/20. Admittedly, the some of the thrill has kind of, uh, gone up in smoke since Oregon finally ended the preposterous cannabis Prohibition, but it’s
Women’s History Month just passed, but fortunately, times are changing enough that Oregon performers and presenters are no longer confining half the human race’s creative accomplishments to only one-twelfth of the calendar year. Several concerts this week focus on women’s voices and
Oregonians today are lucky to be able to hear live performances of music from several centuries, not just the narrow 150 year swath of Central European music that once dominated classical concerts. This week’s concert schedule includes music from the Renaissance, Baroque,
These dark days, it does indeed take a lot of audacity to hope, much more than it did when those words first inspired the nation. Portland Gay Men’s Chorus’s concert of that title includes pop faves like Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy Me”
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